Irssi for MSYS

Previously I tried to port finch which failed and have been looking at centerim too which nowhere easier. Now I'm back to focus on just the IRC part and let pidgin do YM task, the choice is clear: Irssi it also the most promising one to port than the two before. Irssi however is dull without perl just like all irc client supposed to be but adding perl would be too big, too many files.

I decide go with Msys setup which should be straightforward and it is, except how the plugins works. There is no libirrsi.dll or such thing so how it could load dll? note that the plugins isn't loadable module, it does depends/linked to Irssi (which has to be irssi.exe itself in windows unless it linked to irssi wholly). I learned about C Perl embedding too from this which involved joining dynaloader.o file in final linking.

irssi + twirssi in action

As you can see with perl, Irssi could be used as twitter client too although the popular way is using bitlbee gateway, unfortunately bitlbee is not work well with windows and the port is unmaintained. Msys version of Irssi has its quirks too, the obvious one is due to msys' limitation jabber plugin unlikely work but most important ones such as OTR and SILC may work. Because of limited nix functionality I'm stuck with DateTime::TimeZone perl module, which assume Msys as unix rather than Win32 for this particular issue, where perl should look up windows' registry to find local timezone thus modifying local.pm needed by aliasing 'msys' as 'Win32'. Also msys file permission is not entirely nix style which lead unexpected behavior.

BTW installing twirssi on vanilla msys-perl can be troublesome, there are dozens of modules from CPAN will be installed/updated which in the end still not completely satisfy its dependencies. Careful

irssi-0.8.15_msys.7z